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Document: “Building A Diverse Speaker Roster”

Lack of Diversity

Have you noticed that there is mainly one kind of speaker at your WordPress events?

It is a common phenomenon in technology for those who belong to the major population of an area to become the ones to do most of the public speaking. Those who do not fit into that group have many reasons not to step up to speak, – for example, they may not view themselves as belonging to that group, or they may not believe they have anything of value to contribute. As a result, the kinds of speakers at tech events – in our case WordPress events – can frequently become homogeneous.

In North America, for example, many speakers at WordPress events are young, white, cisgender, straight men. There are so many other voices that aren’t being heard as much: women, non-binary and trans folk, genderqueer folk, LGBTQ+, people of colour, people of various physical abilities, people with varying mental health, folks who are older, etc.

Why?

Why does it matter who is at the front of the room speaking?

The audience is not represented by the speakers

Many WordPress events are successfully expanding the kinds of folks who are in the audience. For example, there have been more women-identifying WordPress event attendees in Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal, Canada. That doesn’t mean that everyone in the audience is reflected in the speaker roster – a different group may feel like they don’t belong there. But there are many folks with a wide range of knowledge to share and everyone can feel included.

Users are not represented by the speakers

WordPress is amazing in that it is open source and so all sorts of people use it. We want a more fair representation of our users among the people who are speaking.

Our speakers help shape our technology

One of the ways in which WordPress is being shaped is by the people who speak about it publicly. Many diverse folks, by nature of having had different life experiences, would approach problems differently. Just as how a developer’s point of view is different from a user’s point of view, so are our viewpoints vs the standard speaker. Many people have experiences that aren’t necessarily being shared right now.

Diverse technology needs

If only one kind of person is speaking about the technology, they may be missing key issues that don’t affect them but would prevent other kinds of folks from having the same, positive experiences and success. Size of text and color contrast are two simple, but significant examples. There is much more that can be considered if folks who are affected have the opportunity to speak up.

Unique perspectives benefit everyone

Different kinds of people bring in different kinds of ideas that benefit everyone. A famous example in the physical world is the curb cuts that were first installed to help disabled veterans in the 1940s. They turned out to benefit many more people than the group for which they were originally intended.

By bringing in more diverse people, there’s also an increased chance of bringing in folks who straddle several roles, thus creating unique things with unique perspectives. Power users who use technology in interesting ways, front-end developers, business people who use plugins to make specific kinds of sites, typographers who use WordPress to do cool things with typography… People to talk about running a business in WordPress, how developers can communicate with designers, different things you can do with WordPress… etc.

Now that you know why it is a great idea to build up a diverse speaker roster, let’s look at some challenges in doing so and some potential solutions.

None In My Community

There are no diverse folks in my community

There are no diverse people coming out to your events, and you don’t know any personally who do WordPress.

Solutions:

Ask your network for folks they know of those groups who do WordPress that they could introduce you to.

Find those communities in your area – online and in person. Try to form genuine, friendly relationships with members so that they can then help you reach the WordPress enthusiasts in their communities.

None applied to speak

No diverse people have applied to speak for my event

There are diverse folks who do WordPress in your community, yet they are not applying to be speakers.

Solution: Ask them directly. They may tell you their reasons they wish not to and if they do, listen. The following replies can help. See the next few points.

Nothing to talk about

I ask them directly and they say no because they think they have nothing to talk about

Typically, when member of the dominant group of a region knows a little bit about a topic, they feel like they know enough to give a talk about it. Conversely, frequently when someone from an underrepresented group knows a little bit about a topic, they don’t feel they know enough to talk about it.

Thus, when we ask diverse people: “Would you like to apply to speak at our WordCamp?” we often get these two answers:

“What would I talk about?”

“I don’t know enough to give a talk,” or “I’m not an expert in anything”

Solutions:

Mentor them on the spot. Suggest things you know they could talk about. Explain that you don’t need how-tos but rather stories. Stories are more engaging for audiences. Everyone’s an expert in their own story. Ask if they have a good story about something that they’ve learned or mistakes they’ve made. If they feel they haven’t learned anything yet, one idea is to suggest that they take notes as they start to learn so that they can tell their story about it.

Run our Speaker Training [& Diversity Outreach] workshop that will help them see they have many things they could talk about, and also helps them through many other obstacles they may have currently to public speaking:

http://diversespeakers.info/

(Please tell us you’re running it so we can track how many trainings happen in a given year and/or request help with it here:

Be mindful of using photos throughout the site for your event that show different types of people so that it is clear that diverse people are welcomed at the event. Be sure to include them on the call for speakers page.

Accessible Events

What invisible things are preventing a more diverse group of people from attending and speaking at our events?

We don’t know what invisible things are preventing more kinds of people from attending and speaking at our events

Solutions:

Don’t use gendered words like:

Guys

Girls

Women

Men

Ladies

Gentlemen

Etc.

Instead opt for words such as:

Folks

People

Friends

Assembled guests

Colleagues

Esteemed colleagues

Y’all

Guests

Esteemed Guests

Collaborators

My companions

Partners

All assembled

etc.

Offer childcare.

Have the event at different times that work for people with families. Don’t hold them all at 9pm at night. Weekend afternoons may work. Ask those with children what works for them.

Elevators and ramps rather than stairs.

Washrooms:

Have washrooms that are trans friendly

Have single stall toilets available for trans women who may prefer it and for non-binary folk.

Washrooms that are power wheelchair accessible

Request no one wear scents for the folk who are allergic.

Live captioning.

Sign language interpreters.

Pronouns on your name badges so that people who don’t use the binary pronouns feel welcome. One suggestion is to make this optional so that folks who don’t feel comfortable outing their pronouns in public yet won’t feel obliged, and those who don’t feel comfortable without proper pronouns will feel included with the majority of folks sharing theirs.

Not everyone may want their photos online. It could be for personal reasons or even in some cases, safety reasons. Allow a way for people to opt out of being photographed, such as having a different color lanyard.

Anything else you can think of that expands the kind of person who can speak at and come to your event.

Following these suggestions will help in the road to including more people; that kind of radical inclusion creates an amazing space of respect and innovation for everyone.

This is great. After a couple quick read-throughs, I have some random suggestions in no particular order. Do with them what you will 🙂

I don’t see any mention of Codes of Conduct here. I’ve heard people suggest that this is a good thing to promote to potential speakers when asking them to apply to demonstrate a real commitment to diversity and a safe environment for everyone. Promoting scholarships and free speaker tickets also may help.

It might be worth a mention that this can be a multi-year process. Getting people in diverse communities to come as attendees may need to happen before getting speakers.

Relatedly, ensuring that speaker slides include inclusive images, panels aren’t all cis straight white men, and that specific tracks like the contributor day are also diverse will help with speaker recruitment long term.

Considering speaker diversity during speaker selection can also be important. Organizers can utilize a blind review, but at a minimum should set clear guidelines for what they’re looking for in applications. Including diverse voices in the selection committee is critical to ensuring everyone gets a fair shake and don’t feel tokenized when invited to apply. (Here’s how we handled this stuff at WordCamp Seatte 2017.)

For the “nothing to talk about” concern, WordCamp Seattle has often posted a list of suggested topics so everyone has access to inspiration. It’s no replacement for a good speaker training, but it may reach people who can’t go to events.

Hi @jillbinder did you merge this document into handbooks somewhere? So we can mark this thread as done! If you did, please post a comment with the link to the page in the handbook and mark it as “Top Comment”.
Thanks!

Community Deputy Program

Community Deputies are a team of people all over the world who review WordCamp and Meetup applications, interview lead organizers, and generally keep things moving at WordCamp Central. Here are some useful links about the program: